Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen wrote An Enemy of the People in 1882 as a response to the public outrage over his play Ghosts . Part comedy, part serious drama, the play looks at Dr. Thomas Stockmann's struggle to uphold the truth in the face of intolerance and willful ignorance, as his entire community turns against him. Branded an "Enemy... more...

Dive into the back story behind renowned British novelist Anthony Trollope's rise to literary fame and glory. This autobiography offers a movingly detailed portrait of Trollope's childhood, his early career missteps (including a stint as a postal worker), and his blossoming literary interests and ambitions. more...

Adonais represents the height of artistic achievement for nineteenth-century Romantic poetry. Percy Bysshe Shelley's book-length elegy in the pastoral style mourns the loss of fellow poet John Keats in 495 remarkably accomplished lines. Shelley himself regarded "Adonais" as the best of his work, and the poem is a must-read for fans of... more...

Though he is best remembered as the satirical novelist who penned nineteenth-century masterpieces such as Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray was also an accomplished poet. This volume collects some of Thackeray's most popular ballads, lyrics, and other poems; it is a rewarding read for lovers of traditional verse. more...

By all accounts, Aldous Huxley was a brilliant and voracious thinker and artist whose creative output knew no literary bounds. This volume gathers some of his best-remembered verse, including the memorable title poem, which is a sequence of 22 thematically interwoven sonnets. more...

This long poem written by Scottish author James Thomson is a notable literary accomplishment on several levels. It offers a no-holds-barred account of the seedy underbelly of London's nightlife in the late nineteenth century that stands in sharp contrast to the more popular vision that was advanced in many other Victorian-era novels and poems.... more...

Polish-born author Joseph Conrad is best known as one of the finest prose stylists ever to have written in English. In addition to producing such masterpieces as Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, Conrad also wrote prodigiously in his private life, producing a large body of correspondence. This fascinating collection brings together a large volume of... more...

This play by prolific British author W. Somerset Maugham delves deeper into several subjects that preoccupied Maugham throughout his literary career: the way that our external environment can shape our personalities and choices, and the usually negative consequences that arise from the intermingling of two divergent cultural traditions. In the play,... more...

Religious poetry is a genre that has been around for thousands of years, but in the multi-part epic The Dawn and the Day, lawyer and writer Henry T. Niles adopted a novel approach, attempting to forge a theological and philosophical bridge between two seemingly incompatible belief systems, Christianity and Buddhism. Stirring and thought-provoking,... more...

In 1895, Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years of hard labor as punishment for having engaged in homosexual acts. While serving out his sentence at Reading Gaol in Berkshire, Wilde witnessed the execution by hanging of a young soldier who had murdered his wife by slashing her throat. Profoundly shaken by the execution and the crime that preceded it,... more...